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To get good, go after the metagame
What do metagames have to do with the acquisition of expertise?
Cedric Chin
Commoncog is about accelerating business expertise. Updates weekly.
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Tacit knowledge is more important than deliberate practice
What tacit knowledge is, and why it is the most interesting topic in the study of expertise today.
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Games people play with cash flow
One way that first principles thinking fails is when you build your analysis up from a deficient set of base principles. Everything is correct and true, but you still end up mistaken. Here's how that looks like in practice.
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So Good They Can't Ignore You
Following your passion is the worst career advice you can get. Cal Newport argues for a more effective alternative.
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Focus is saying no to good ideas
Several stories about one of the hardest maxims to put to practice in business.
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Games people play with cash flow
One way that first principles thinking fails is when you build your analysis up from a deficient set of base principles. Everything is correct and true, but you still end up mistaken. Here's how that looks like in practice.
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The Skill of Org Design
Building effective organisations is a remarkably useful, if rare, skill. This is what it looks like, what it consists of, and how to tell if someone has it.
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Y Combinator and Power in Silicon Valley
A demonstration of power by Silicon Valley’s top startup accelerator.
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‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ Doesn't Work That Well
Why ‘Strong Opinions, Weakly Held’ isn't as great a thinking tool as you might think.
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Deming Paradox: Operationally rigorous companies aren't nice places to work
Is it possible to be data driven and operationally rigorous and still be human centric at the same time? Deming — who came up with these data techniques — believe that it is possible. I'm not so sure.
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Ability to see expertise is a milestone worth aiming for (2022)
Good news: we have a neat, universal milestone on the journey to mastery. What that looks like, and how to use it.
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Pay attention to deviations from mainstream incentives
The second part of a three part piece on incentives. It turns out that if you've grokked the primary incentives of an industry, you can do one other thing: identify aberrations, and use that as a guide to dig further.
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What good cash-strapped hiring looks like
Bootstrapped operators who take their hiring seriously all eventually end up designing a system with the same fundamental approach. Here's how you can do it too.
14
Mental Model Fallacy (2018)
The mental model fallacy is that it’s worth it to read descriptions of mental models, written and aggregated by non-practitioners, in the pursuit of self-improvement and success. It isn't.
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The iPhone Keyboard – Make It or Break It (2022)
Building the first iPhone's touchscreen keyboard was a make-it-or-break-it moment for the iPhone. Succeed, and the iPhone was possible. Fail, and the iPhone would've been shelved. This is its story.
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Be good to your mentors
Mentor relationships can be absolutely wonderful over the arc of a career. This is a simple way to think about finding and keeping good mentors.
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The Problems with Deliberate Practice (2020)
Have you ever tried putting deliberate practice to practice? If you have, it's likely that you'll have noticed just how difficult it is to apply deliberate practice principles to your career. Anyone that tells you otherwise is lying; here's why.
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Goodhart’s law isn’t as useful as you might think (2023)
Goodhart's Law is useless. It tells you about a phenomenon, but it doesn't tell you how to solve it. We look at how organisations actually prevent Goodhart's Law, and illustrate this with Amazon's Weekly Business Review as an example.
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Are you playing to play, or playing to win?
Make sure you're playing the real game, not some more complicated game you've made up for yourself.
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The First Hedge Fund
How A. W. Jones improvised his way to an investment style and structure that has persisted till today.
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Burnout
What do we actually know about burnout? What does the research say? Is burnout preventable? All the research, in one free, updated place.
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When First Principles Thinking Fails (2020)
Thinking is split roughly into pattern matching against experience, and reasoning from first principles. Here's one argument for why you need both.